Brought From Beyond

The magpie and the bowerbird, its odd predilection unheard of by Marco Polo when he came upon, high in Badakhshan, that blue stone’s embedded glint of pyrites, like the dance of light on water, or of angels (the surface tension of the Absolute) on nothing, turned, by processes already ancient, into pigment: ultramarine, brought from beyond the water it’s the seeming color of, and of the berries, blooms and pebbles finickingly garnishing an avian shrine or bower with the rarest hue in nature, whatever nature is: the magpie’s eye for glitter from the clenched fist of the Mesozoic folding: the creek sands, the mine shaft, the siftings and burnishings, the ingot, the pagan artifact: to propagate the faith, to find the metal, unearth it, hoard it up, to, by the gilding of basilicas, transmute it: O magpie, O bowerbird, O Marco Polo and Coronado, where do these things, these fabrications, come from—the holy places, ark and altarpiece, the aureoles, the seraphim—and underneath it all the howling?